The Splog Solution Lies in Economics, Not Just Technologics

In Newsweek this week, Steven Levy writes that he's fed up with sploggers clogging up his Technorati results. In the piece, Google's Jason Goldman explains how they are fighting spam blogs by changing blog-creating process and creating ways for readers to report bogus pages.

Why does everyone rush to just assume that technology will solve this problem? Sure, we need some of that, but this is an economic situation. Alter the economics and the splog issue will subside.

The reason that there are so many splogs is that clearly there are some who are making money thanks to the Adsense economy. If Google tightens up who is allowed to run Adsense ads and polices this program more carefully, then the splog problem will be mitigated...at least for now. The spammers will find other ways to make money and then this will be someone else's cross to bear.

Technorati Tags: AdSense, Blogs, Google, Newsweek, Spam, Splog, Splogs

Comments

[aaron wall]

A friend of mine has access to some splog data...and most of it was not paid for by AdSense...I have ranted about the AdSense stuff many times, but that is only one of many pieces of the splog issue.

[Eric Giguere]

This is a problem that is endlessly debated in the various AdSense forums. The AdSense terms and conditions are pretty vague in many areas, and in some ways it goes against Google's best interests to disable splogs and other spammy pages. As you point out, the reason they've proliferated is that there's a way to make money with them, despite Google's use of "smart pricing" and other tactics. So one could argue that some of them, at least, must be leading to sales for advertisers. But at what point does Google's "do no evil" mantra kick in and force them to deal more seriously with this problem?

No doubt this is why Google and the other major players are looking at trust-based ranking systems, which indirectly puts a human back into the loop (shades of Yahoo!) in order to get batter results.